"'The Gun': How AK-47s Changed The Nature Of War" - from NPR News and the NPR program, All Things Considered

The image is iconic: the stubby barrel, the inverted arc of the banana clip. Osama bin Laden included one in his video after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Saddam Hussein had a pair with him when he was captured. It appears on the flag of Mozambique and Hezbollah. The AK-47 — or versions of it — can be found in every major conflict of the past 50 years. In his new book, The Gun, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter C.J. Chivers traces the history of the lethal firearm. Chivers, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, tells NPR's Audie Cornish the gun is one of the principle weapons of insurgents in Afghanistan, where he's been reporting.

Download the podcast here. Read the full NPR All Things Considered feature story, here. Newsday posted a few pages of the book, here. And The New York Times had this to say about the book, recently:

It is no accident that C. J. Chivers opens “The Gun,” his bold history of the AK-47, not with the loud crack that is the report of the rifle but with the monstrous bang of the first detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb. As Mr. Chivers’s detailed history then skirts as far back as the United States Civil War and brings us right up to the current conflict in Afghanistan, the message of his prologue is clear: For all that the escalating cold war shaped the last 60 years, no one was ever killed in conflict by a Russian nuke. By contrast untold millions have been wounded and killed by the AK-47 and related weapons, as they have proliferated and mutated from tools of engineering ingenuity, honestly wrought in defense of the socialist motherland, to the firearm of choice for both oppressor and oppressed.

Find that Times piece, here. The Los Angeles Times also plugs the book:

If somebody were to tell you that the long tragedy of human warfare entered a new and deadly phase in the fourth decade of the 20th century, the historically literate mind almost certainly would jump to the invention of the atomic bomb, which ushered in an age of anxiety and the long balance of terror between the United States and the Soviet Union. C.J. Chivers makes a convincing case in "The Gun" that a far more lethal and consequential weapon was devised at about that same time in a sprawling Soviet military design facility — the first Avtomat (Automatic) Kalashnikov assault rifle. "The Gun" is the author's exhaustive history of the rifle's origins, development and astonishing influence on global security. The banana-clipped Kalashnikov is by now a familiar sight to anyone who watches a few minutes of television news footage; it's the weapon clasped to the chests of Kim Jong Il's goose-stepping legions, waved high by Somali pirates, clutched by Africa's wretched child soldiers, leaning up against a mud-washed wall in Osama bin Laden's infamous videos.

You can find the Los Angeles Times mention, here (it's a few paragraphs; nothing meaty). And the New York Post had this to say about The Gun:

In his fascinating book, “The Gun” (Simon & Schuster), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers shows how the world was forever altered by the pursuit of automatic weapons and especially the invention of the Kalashnikov — an easy-to-use automatic rifle that allowed any one man to possess the firepower of an army.

Finally, for a little over a year now, Chivers has been maintaining this blog at The New York Times. The blog's central theme is war and small arms. And on that note, there's a pairing that we can do here, though not with another book; a 2005 film starring Nicholas Cage, "Lord of War." The movie's theme is closely aligned with the sentiments in Chivers' book, and it's hard to not think of the movie, while reading the book, and vice versa; mainly because of the weight of the AK-47, the credit and the responsibility that's placed on this sole item. IMDB carries this storyline description:

This film charts the rise and fall of Yuri Orlov, from his early days in the early 1980s in Little Odessa, selling guns to mobsters in his local neighbourhood, through to his ascension through the decade of excess and indulgence into the early 90s, where he forms a business partnership with an African warlord and his psychotic son. The film also charts his relationship through the years with his younger brother, his marriage to a famous model, his relentless pursuit by a determined federal agent and his inner demons that sway between his drive for success and the immorality of what he does.

Find the that IMDB profile here. Wikipedia has this to say, about the film's historical accuracy:

Plot details on the illegal arms market, particularly regarding purchases for Tropical Africa in early 1990s, are closely based on real stories and people originating from the former Soviet Union. The main protagonist's name, Yuri Orlov, corresponds to the last name of Oleg Orlov, a Russian businessman arrested in Ukraine on suspicion of smuggling missiles to Iran. The real Orlov was strangled in Kiev's Lukyanivska Prison in 2007 during the investigation.[7] The character Andre Baptiste, Sr. is partly based on Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia until 2003.[8] The character of Colonel Oliver Southern is evidently hinting of Oliver North, most famous for his involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal. However, the scenes of direct shipping of weapons from Ukraine's army storages is fictional.[7] Portrayal of the Interpol as an acting security agency is also entirely fictional.

Amnesty International supported and endorsed the film. There's an internet movie firearms database, the IMFDB (sort of like the IMDB, no relation). The site lists all of the firearms, along with the AK-47, that were featured in the film.